In this
issue:
i) Food for
the Soul - J.Boot
ii) The Public
confession of the sin? (Pafrt 3) - C.E. Wigg
Food for the
Soul
Joe
Boot
One terrifying day Howard Rutledge's plane was
shot down over Vietnam. He managed to parachute out but landed in a village
where he was beaten, stripped, and thrown into prison. Thus began a brutal
incarceration, lasting seven years, that can only be described as a living hell:
eating rotting soup and animal fat, in the company of spiders the size of a
human hand and rats the size of cats. He was cold, alone, and tortured, left in
pools of his own waste, chained in agonizing positions and being eaten alive by
insects feasting on his open sores. He later wrote a book of his experiences
called In the Presence of Mine Enemies, where he describes those years
and how he stayed sane through the horror. His words are so telling, I quote him
in length:
"Now the sights and sounds and smells of death were all
around me. My hunger for spiritual food soon outdid my hunger for a steak. Now I
wanted to know about that part of me that will never die. Now I wanted to talk
about God and Christ and the church. But in Heartbreak [the name they gave to
their prison] solitary confinement there was no pastor, no Sunday-school
teacher, no Bible, no hymnbook, no community of believers to guide and sustain
me. I had completely neglected the spiritual dimension of my life. It took
prison to show me how empty life is without God, and so I had to go back in my
memory to those Sunday-school days in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If I couldn't have a
Bible and hymn book, I would try to rebuild them in my mind… Most of my fellow
prisoners were struggling like me to rediscover faith, to reconstruct workable
value systems… Everyone knew the Lord's prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, but
the camp favorite verse that everyone recalled first and quoted most often is
found in the Gospel of John, third chapter, sixteenth verse ["for God so loved
the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not
perish but may have eternal life,]… how I struggled to recall those scriptures
and hymns… The enemy knew that the best way to break a man's resistance was to
crush his spirit in a lonely cell. In other words, some of our POWs after
solitary confinement lay down in a fetal position and died. All this talk of
scripture and hymns may seem boring to some, but it was the way we conquered our
enemy and overcame the power of death around us."(1)
The Bible is not just
another book. It stands out above Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, or other
religious writings. These soldiers were not trying to recall nursery rhymes or
even Tolstoy and Blake; instead, they desperately tried to remember the words of
the Bible. Something has kept this book, to this day, at the top of the
best-seller list every year. Whatever we may at present believe or think about
the Bible, the influence for good that it has exerted upon the globe is
immeasurable.
Sadly, many people approach it in a purely theoretical
way, considering the Scriptures to be just another topic of conversation, like
music or fashion. But the Bible does not come across as a piece of literature
merely to be studied and analyzed. The POWs in Vietnam were not trying to recall
Bible verses for their literary beauty or to play deconstructionist games; they
were seeking to draw on the Bible's power to feed their souls in a time of
desperation.
I have yet to meet a person whose life was in a terrible
mess who claimed that atheism suddenly revealed a truth that changed his or her
life for lasting good.
Ultimately, the most visible evidence for the
truth of the Bible lies in the changed lives of those who embrace its message.
Talk of reliable texts and compelling archaeology may convince the mind but do
not often touch the heart. If the message is true, surely it will work in
practice. Millions of Christians around the world confirm that it does. The God
whom we meet in its pages, most wonderfully in the person of Christ, speaks to
us personally and meets us where we are. Jesus offers not simply moral ethics,
but himself, the Son of God, in relationship, to change us from the inside out.
Consequently, when we look in the Bible we see ourselves, as if in a mirror, as
it describes us and our failures and points us to God by whose power we can be
transformed.
The message of the Bible mends broken lives and has the
power to transform society, not by pointing us to ink on a page, but to the God
it reveals. Empty ideologies leave us spiritually starved, but Jesus said, "I am
the bread of life" (John 6:35), and the proof is in the eating.
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(1) Howard and Phyllis Rutledge and Mel and Lyla
White, In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Fleming H. Revell, 1973).
From Searching for Truth by Joe Boot, © 2002. Used by permission
of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL
60187, www.crossway.com. Download for personal use only.
Joe Boot is
executive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in
Canada.
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[Copyright(c) 2005 Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. A Slice of Infinity is a ministry
of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.]
The
public confession of sin? (Part 3)
It is a sound practice
for any believer to look back over their life at the end of each day, and if we
are conscious of having sinned during the passage of the day, for us to confess
the matter to the Lord and to thus have it cleansed away by Him, out of our
lives, and for communion to be restored before we go to sleep for the night. The
Holy Spirit will convict us through the Word of God, when we sin against Him. If
we sin we grieve Him, but when we confess and forsake our sins we bring joy to
His great heart of love. Let us remember the statement, “Grieve not the Holy
Spirit”. (Ephesians 4:30)
This daily confession of sin would be in the secret of
our bedchamber and would be heard only by our Heavenly Father, and if we are
married by our life partner.
Confess and forsake: We are told
in the Proverbs that we should not only confess our sin, but forsake it also.
(Proverbs 29:13). We will all admit that we often ask forgiveness for a sin, and
then go and do the same thing again. This is quite wrong, as God has provided
ample power for us to overcome the power of indwelling sin, and to enable us to
live a life of personal holiness, honour and virtue. (2Peter 1:3) Let us also
learn to distinguish between the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and the
condemnation of Satan. Satan will always try to magnify our smallest faults, to
such a degree that we may allow him to persuade us that our sin is so terrible
that God could never forgive us for what we have done. He will try to rob us of
the assurance of our salvation, and to persuade us that we were never truly
saved in the first place, (or when we thought we were). The Holy Spirit will
never do this, but will point us to the remedy, to Christ and give us the sense
that He has suffered for all of our sins. He will tell us again and again the
“The blood of Jesus Christ His Son, cleanses, (goes on cleansing), from all,
(every) sin”.
Sin Is defiling: We must realise
that sin is defiling, and the public confession of the lurid details of sin will
defile those who listen to what is said. There are groups that lay great
emphasis on the public confession of sin, but history has proved this to be
counter productive. It has been known that in so called “Confession Meetings”,
where a person of either sex will stand and reveal the sordid details of moral
failure that those who listen to the confession have gone away from the meeting,
and committed the same sin themselves. The confession of one has inflamed the
passions of another, and the defilement has thus been spread to others.
It has also been known that where a person publicly
confesses to failure, that as they have spoken another present in the meeting
who has been practicing the same sin has come under conviction and has been
moved to confess their sin also. This has sometimes been used to justify the
unscriptural practice of the public confession of sin. But it is merely
autosuggestion, the conscience of the other person is already convicted, and
that person feels both guilty and dirty, (defiled), and probably lives in the
constant fear of being discovered. If it leads to true holiness of Life, then
God be praised, but usually it is not so, but instead spreads the contagion.
(Hebrews 12:15)
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[Reproduced by
permission of the
Author]